Postcards from Auschwitz. Daniel P. Reynolds
more forthright acknowledgment that the vast majority of victims at Auschwitz were murdered for no other reason than being Jewish. What is remarkable is that this transition took place at a time when the Communist Party in Poland was becoming increasingly and overtly anti-Semitic. Tourism, particularly in the mode of service tourism and commemorative visits, had begun to relocate the responsibility for Auschwitz memorialization in a more deliberately international context, with groups from other countries demanding a role in shaping remembrance and preservation at the memorial, as we will see below. Tourism thereby played an important role in furthering the process of acknowledging the Jewish victims at Auschwitz, even at a time when the political climate in Poland would seem to have been unfavorable.35
Throughout the Cold War, alternating periods of tension and thaw between East and West had a direct impact on tourism, severely restricting travel across the Iron Curtain at some times while easing restrictions at others. But tourism also exerted pressure of its own to allow access to travelers. Besides the fact that tourism was one of the few ways in which citizens from East and West could get to know one another, the considerable amount of wealth generated by the tourism industry was crucial to the struggling economies of postwar Europe. That was particularly true for the Soviet-dominated East, whose currency had little purchasing power internationally. The fact that tourism brought in the West’s hard currency to the economically struggling Soviet Bloc ensured that the doors could never stay closed for long. And whenever those doors opened, tourism between East and West represented an exchange not only of currency but also of cultural values, despite the strident rhetoric of postwar propaganda.36
Tourists always bring expectations, and the tourism industry has to work to respond and accommodate those expectations while in turn making demands of its own on tourists. The dynamics of tourism as a market, as a circulation not only of goods and services but also of cultural expectations and performances, applies as much to Auschwitz as to any other tourist destination. The dramatic transformations that have taken place at the Auschwitz memorial site are a powerful reminder that tourism cannot be reduced to the passive consumption of displays decided by others. Rather, tourism both responds to and helps influence policies that govern the memorial sites. Whatever other geopolitical factors have shaped access to Auschwitz—and they are considerable—tourism has also played a decisive role, and indeed, one could argue that tourism offered a highly visible stage where geopolitical tensions could find expression. In the years following World War II, tourism became one of the most public arenas in which communist and Polish nationalist narratives at Auschwitz could be challenged by an international public, the grounds on which struggle over access to the site was waged, and the measure by which the gradual opening of Auschwitz to the international community was achieved.37
The Evolution of Tourism to Auschwitz: The Cold War and Beyond
The earliest tourists to Auschwitz were composed of school groups from Poland, whose visit to the site was a mandatory part of the curriculum.38 These school groups saw Auschwitz I, the Stammlager, where the Nazis kept Polish figures whom they regarded as ideological enemies, including Polish Communists and many members of the Catholic Church. The first crematorium was built in Auschwitz I, and an adjacent room that had been designed as a morgue was converted into a gas chamber, even though Auschwitz I was not established originally as a center for extermination on a massive scale. At the Stammlager was the infamous Block 11, where the torture and executions of prisoners, including Father Maximilian Kolbe, were carried out. Other prisoners killed at Auschwitz I included 600 Soviet prisoners of war who were murdered in 1941, gassed in experiments using Zyklon B that led to the use of that chemical as the principal method for mass murder at Birkenau. Since the Polish state after the war exercised a monopoly on school curricula, the intact remains of Auschwitz I provided a powerful teaching moment that could be used to reinforce a sense of Poland’s indebtedness to their Soviet liberators and point to sacrifices made by the Red Army to defeat Germany. At the same time, Polish schools reinforced a sense of Polish national solidarity by emphasizing the martyrdom of such figures as Father Kolbe.
Figure 1.2. The crematorium at Auschwitz I, August 2007, with the entrance to the gas chamber that was originally a morgue. The gas chamber was reconstructed to include shower heads to depict the destroyed gas chambers of Birkenau. Photo by the author.
Meanwhile, Auschwitz II (Birkenau) remained beyond the earliest guided tours. Visitors could cover the two kilometers to the site on their own, with no guide to accompany them. With limited resources for managing such an expansive site and few suitable structures in which to install exhibitions, Birkenau remained largely a ruin; the story of Birkenau was instead told at Auschwitz I. The collections of hair, the suitcases and the personal effects of the new arrivals, much of which had been warehoused at Birkenau, were brought to the Stammlager after the war to be shown to tourists. The museum faced an overwhelming task of managing a camp complex that included over forty subcamps, of which Birkenau was the most notorious. Given the infamy of Birkenau as an extermination camp, clearly some arrangement would have to be made to emphasize Birkenau in the geography of tourism to Auschwitz, even if the site did not so easily conform to the ideology of the immediate postwar era. As early as 1957, the museum announced an international competition to erect a monument at Birkenau that would serve as a focal point for memorialization there.39 The monument was not erected until 1967, and even there, the Jewish and Gypsy identities of those gassed on arrival was blurred into the undifferentiated and incorrect number of “four million [sic] people [who] suffered and died here at the hands of the Nazi murderers between the years 1940 and 1945.”40 As James E. Young, a pioneer scholar in the field of Holocaust memorialization, explains, “The figure of 4 million was as wrong as it was round, arrived at by a combination of [camp commandant Rudolf Höss’s] self-aggrandizing exaggerations, Polish perceptions of their great losses, and the Soviet occupiers’ desire to create socialist martyrs.”41
While the Iron Curtain ensured that most visitors to the camp memorial would come from Poland and other Warsaw Pact nations, a gradual process of stabilization in relations with the West during the Cold War brought about the steady increase in tourism to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum from other parts of the globe.42 These groups ranged from church groups from East and West Germany, who began traveling to the site in 1966 as a gesture of atonement,43 to the Israeli-sponsored March of the Living, which has been gathering Jewish participants from around the globe since 1988 to travel to Poland and Israel as a way of identifying with a collective Jewish trauma and its redemption in a Jewish state.44 Meanwhile, school groups and socialist youth organizations from across the Eastern Bloc countries continued to visit the camp as a way of forging solidarity among one another, united in their suffering under fascism, their liberation by the Soviet Union, and their shared project of realizing socialism.
Among the tour groups traveling to Auschwitz from abroad, one of the oldest comes from both sides of a divided Germany. Since the 1960s, the ecumenical Christian organization Aktion Sühnezeichen, or Action Reconciliation, has organized travel by volunteers for service abroad as an effort to acknowledge and make restitution for crimes committed by Germany during the Third Reich. While the organization extended into both East and West Germany, the Cold War made collaboration between both branches extremely difficult. Still, both branches played active roles in the maintenance of Auschwitz and other camps in Poland as sites of remembrance. Among the activities of Aktion Sühnezeichen was the unearthing of Crematorium II and Crematorium III in Birkenau, meant as a way to acknowledge Germany’s perpetration of genocide.45 Aktion Sühnezeichen presented a case of “volunteer tourism,” a term that has emerged in more recent years to describe service-oriented travel. For Aktion Sühnezeichen, the purpose of these trips was conceived as a form of penance, a religiously inflected modality of the German discourse of Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit (working through the past).46 The presence of Aktion Sühnezeichen in Auschwitz, and its status as an alternative to compulsory military service in West Germany, merged two discourses of reconciliation in West Germany. The first, a specifically Christian discourse of atonement, sought reconciliation through confession and good works. The other, the political discourse of the Federal Republic, sought to overcome the divisions of the Cold War that had its clearest manifestation in a Germany divided into two states.47 These two discourses were not mutually exclusive; indeed, they informed and enhanced